Jeez. I can't believe it's been a month since I posted .. My class over at Phaedrus Academy has just siphoned off all my excess bloggy goodness - not that I had a lot going in.
But I STILL have all the EVO2005 group in my aggregator and I'm still reading.
I used James Farmer's Edublogs.org for the students. It's worked well because they're all WordPress blogs and very smooth. The "theme menu" is nice .. they can pick a good looking theme and not worry about hacking the style sheets together. It loses a little bit from not being able to customize the template, I think, but the upside is that all they have to master is reading, writing, commenting, and aggregating while they're working on the basics of distance education.